Halls of Fame

Ryan and Sara Hall making their mark on American distance running

Back at the turn of the millennium, a rising tide in American distance running was beginning to crest. A new group of high schoolers, linked by the Internet and spurred on by each other’s accomplishments, was training harder and racing faster than anyone had done in a generation. When this crop of youngsters reached maturity, many felt, they would bring U.S. distance running back to respectability and competitiveness on the international scene.

Leading the way, figuratively and literally, were Dathan Ritzenhein, who ran away from everyone in winning two Foot Locker national cross country titles, and Alan Webb, who smashed the 4-minute barrier and then Jim Ryun’s decades-old high school record for the mile on the track. The pair generated tremendous media attention and in their wake, towed dozens of their contemporaries into tougher workouts and faster times. Leading this trailing pack was a laid back, gangly, soft-spoken kid from the mountains of Northern California named Ryan Hall.

Hall was a relative latecomer to running; his high school in Big Bear Lake didn’t even have a cross country team until his junior year. But, aided by years of living at 6,700 feet of altitude, he quickly established himself as the top high schooler in the country behind Ritzenhein and Webb, finishing just four seconds behind the latter at the 2000 Foot Locker nationals, then falling just short of joining him in the sub 4-minute mile club.

Now, as the first decade of the 21st century draws near its end, Hall has made a strong case for himself as the best runner to emerge from that class of ’01. Ritzenhein has proven to be a sometimes brilliant but often fragile runner, his injuries more numerous than the national championships he’s won, while Webb has lowered his mile best to 3:48.92 yet proven tactically wanting at the highest level of international championship racing. Meanwhile Hall, following a solid but unspectacular college career, highlighted by a runner-up finish behind Ritzenhein at the 2003 NCAA cross country championship, has in the past year begun to establish himself as a plausible heir apparent to the Olympian status of veterans like Alan Culpepper and Hall’s current training partner, Meb Keflezighi.

In his first year as a professional runner, beginning in autumn of 2005, he won national titles in 12K cross country and in the 20K and half marathon on the roads. In January of 2007, he scorched an American-record 59:43 over a loaded field at the Aramco Houston Half Marathon, called by some one of the greatest American distance performances of the last 15 years. And in April, he made his much-anticipated debut at the marathon distance, facing an international all-star field in London. Hall not only met the crazily unrealistic expectations many had placed on him, he exceeded them, running 2:08:24, the fastest American debut by 1:16 and the second fastest in U.S. history. It may be the classic example, in the perspective of admittedly short and incomplete careers, of the tortoise catching and passing the hares who burst to the lead in the early going.

That’s certainly not to imply that Hall is some stiff-legged shuffler who has simply clawed his way to the top by dint of sheer volume of hard work; a 1,500 meter PR of 3:42.70 is ample proof of the speed inherent in his legs. And yet his may be the case of a runner who took just a bit longer to find his real calling, the métier in which he could truly express his God-given running ability.

Hall has made most of this athletic journey with the company of his wife, Sara, one of the country’s top young middle distance stars. The two met at a high school cross country meet ("My first impression of Ryan was seeing him tear off his bib number and throw it on the ground and kick it," she recalls), matriculated together at Stanford where they started dating as freshmen, and married the autumn after graduation. And while their different competitive focuses have meant they are traveling increasingly divergent, if parallel, paths, they are bound together not only by their sport and the love of two newlyweds, but by an intense faith that serves as the underpinning of their training and racing.

"It’s our motivator and what gives us the passion to go out there and train hard every day," says Ryan. "You’ve got to know why you’re doing it; for us it’s to be faithful to the gift and to try to bring glory to God." Indeed, much of their lives seems to be guided by some sort of divine intervention, from being put in adjacent dorms as freshmen to the way they simply showed up to run with Team USA California after college, unaware of how highly selective the group was. And after some ups and downs typical of the adjustment to the rigors of running full time, both are poised to take the next step to be mentioned in the same breath as runners like their training partners, Keflezighi and Deena Kastor.

That move has come sooner for Ryan than Sara, who finds herself in the somewhat unenviable position of being a natural for 3,000 meters, a non-Olympic distance contested only indoors, in which she’s finished second at the past two USA indoor championships. "At Stanford I never trained like a miler because they needed me in other events for points," she says. "But the 5,000 never really ‘stuck’ so this year I’m going to give the mile a real try and see if I can make it in that event; if not I’ll know my future is in the 5K."

The move to longer distances was similarly resisted by her husband, who fancied himself a miler through the first part of his college career. "In America it’s all about the 100 and the mile," he says. "I was all set on being a miler in high school and I did pretty well (4:00.52 for 1,600), so that reinforced my belief. Then in college it just went terribly.

"I tried doing shorter stuff to be a better miler and that didn’t work out. It wasn’t until my junior year in cross country that I realized, ‘I really enjoy this longer stuff.’ I don’t know why I was so blind to it because I’ve always been really good at long tempo runs and really enjoyed long interval sessions — that stuff just comes naturally to me but I just didn’t see it. It’s been like a revelation."

Ryan’s proclivity for longer distances was not immediately apparent to his coach at Team California either. In spite of Terrence Mahon’s expertise in coaching some of the country’s best marathoners, most notably Kastor, Mahon said, "Initially the focus for Ryan was the 5,000, to try to get close to 13 minutes."

When the Halls arrived at Mammoth after their September 2005 wedding, the first major goal race was the USATF cross country meet the following February in New York. "They were both running the 4K, knowing it was the last year for that race, and then Sara would run the 3,000 at indoor nationals a few weeks later," says Mahon. "We figured Ryan might as well run the 12K [at cross country] too; since it came after the 4, it would be kind of like dessert. We knew he was in great shape, he’d been doing 8-mile tempo runs at 4:35 pace, so it was just a matter of not going out too hard, then making a push he could carry all the way to the finish."

That point came midway through the fourth 2-kilometer loop, when Ryan left the rest of the field, including Ritzenhein and Jorge Torres, staggering behind him. The frigid Bronx air played havoc with Sara’s breathing, however, as she collapsed across the finish in sixth place, although she bounced back strongly to take second in the USATF indoor championship 3,000. Each then ran in the IAAF world championships, Sara placing 12th indoors in Moscow and Ryan taking 19th and 43rd at World Cross in Fukuoka.

That seemed to bode well for the outdoor track season to come, but things never seemed to click just right. Ryan finished eighth at the USATF 5,000 and Sara, in spite of two PRs in Europe, never quite put everything together for a peak performance.

"When a new athlete and coach start working together there’s a certain period of getting to know one another," says Mahon. "The biggest mistake we made was letting Ryan get carried away in workouts. He ran some phenomenal ones, but he buried himself."

It was a trait that had hampered Ryan in college, and the result this time was a virus he caught after nationals and couldn’t shake during an abbreviated European track season he termed "disastrous."

"We decided to shut it down and then try to gear up for the fall, but Ryan felt like he’d done all this hard training and had nothing to show for it," says Mahon. "After about three weeks of so-so training he started to feel good and wanted to try to win another national title." As an 11th-hour entrant in the USA 20K championship in New Haven, CT, Hall let a dozen others take their turns at the front before taking the lead for good with two miles to go, cruising away to a 14-second win in the longest race he’d ever run. A brief September sojourn on the roads proved equally successful for Sara, who won the Fifth Avenue Mile in 4:28:0 and the USA 5K championship in Rhode Island.

Ryan’s New Haven run earned him a spot on the American team for the first IAAF World Road Racing Championship, a 20K in Debrecen, Hungary. He tuned up with a course record 28:23 at the Cow Harbor 10K in Long Island. "A lot of good guys have run there, so we knew his fitness was coming back," says Mahon. "The key for the worlds was to not get over-excited, and get sucked out with the leaders going out too fast, so his first 5K, which was his slowest, he was in about 60th. Once the pace settled down he started passing guys, gaining confidence, and he could make a run for the top 10." Although he fell just short, placing 11th, his time of 57:54 shaved almost a minute off Abdi Abdirahman’s American record.

That made Hall the hot name among American distance runners, and earned him an invitation to watch the ING New York City Marathon from the pace car, a tactic the organizers had used the year before to lure Ritzenhein into making his debut in the 2006 race.

The excitement of that race, and the fact that the men’s Olympic Trials marathon was going to be held in New York the following year, piqued Hall’s interest in giving the 26-mile distance a try. After all, he still had track as a fallback; part of the reason the New York organizers had scheduled the Trials for the fall was to allow younger, faster track runners like Hall, Torres and Ritzenhein to race the marathon without sacrificing their track seasons, and at least for Hall, who seemed to get better the farther he raced, it was perfect logic.

"I said, ‘Let’s do one six-week cycle of marathon training and see how your body responds’," says Mahon. "Houston fit in at the end of that cycle as a test race, and we knew it was a course that could warrant a fast time — based on the training he was doing by the end of January, we knew he had a shot at the American record."

Hall’s biggest challenge proved to be getting to the starting line at all. On the way to the airport, his car slid off the road in heavy snow, and a passing motorist pulled it back on with chains. In the course of several delayed flights, he felt himself coming down with a cold that had been nagging him all week, and after a few fitful hours of sleep arrived at the start just hoping to finish respectably. Less than an hour later, he had sliced 72 seconds off the 21-year-old AR of Mark Curp, one of the best road racers of the ’80s. "I was getting the splits on my watch and I saw 4:30s," Hall recounts. "I said, ‘I’m having a pretty good day here.’"

The next test effort came at the USA 15K championships at the Gate River Run in Jacksonville, FL. By this point the expectations on Ryan were growing ridiculously high, with many predicting an American record every time he toed the line. "He was coming in as one of the big dogs, with Meb, and I think even he was thinking he could get the record," says Mahon. As it turned out, Hall had a solid yet, for him, unspectacular showing, finishing behind Keflezighi after a late race surge brought him past several runners who were leading him during the first half of the race. Admittedly, the conditions in Jacksonville precluded any sort of record attempt, with temperatures and humidity both in the 80s at the start, but that didn’t temper Hall’s expectations, and it cost him, more mentally than physically. "When I saw I wasn’t hitting the splits I wanted, I kind of lost a little enthusiasm," he says. "I’ve got to learn to overcome that."

"He learned a good lesson from Meb there," says Mahon. "How to win a race when you’re not 100 percent, when conditions aren’t ideal."

Ryan returned to Mammoth for a final six-week cycle of marathon training during which things really fell into place. "My tempo runs started coming around, and the long runs got easier," he says. "There’s a certain callusing effect from going through several cycles of training," says Mahon. "The difference between someone like Ryan and, say, Deena, who’s done several years of it, isn’t so much in the training as the recovery — it’s a lot easier for her at this point."

At the end of this final cycle Hall stepped on the track and, without the benefit of any speedwork, ran a 28:07.93 at the Stanford Invitational meet in his first track 10,000. While some armchair quarterbacks felt that was far too slow for someone of Hall’s talent, the ease with which he’d been able to clip off lap after lap at 64 seconds told him he was ready for London.

"We’d already had a plan for running a spring marathon, that we were going to finalize based on the half," says Mahon. "The problem is when you break an hour in the half you can’t go into any marathon low-key, so ultimately London ended up being the perfect choice — with the field they have, he’s still a ‘nobody.’ There wasn’t a lot of pressure on him, and it would be a good learning curve on a lot of levels."

London dawned warm and sunny, and while many of the big names like Gebrselassie, Khannouchi and Keflezighi wilted to the side of the road, Hall continued to run with the leaders, showing little respect for and certainly no fear of men who had won World Championships and Marathon Majors titles. Like a rookie pitching a no-hitter in his first major league start, Hall was in a groove, even daring to move to the front himself at 23 miles. "I just wanted to taste what it was like to be in the lead of a big race," he said later. Although he couldn’t respond when World Champion Jaouad Gharib of Morocco surged shortly thereafter, he didn’t collapse into a survival shuffle in No Man’s Land, hanging on to finish seventh, ahead of New York City Marathon Champion Marilson Gomes dos Santos, and just 18 second behind world record holder Paul Tergat.

"My race in London was great, the most fun I’ve ever had," Hall said the week following the race, not a typical comment heard from many first-time marathoners. "I really enjoyed the first 23 miles; it was like running in a parade. The last three my legs started getting tight, and I was just trying to work through that — it was a different feeling than in a shorter race.

"I wasn’t paying attention to the time when I was running, but it wasn’t a great day to run fast — our splits were all over the place. I think on a cooler day I could have run a lot faster. But I couldn’t have asked for a better debut. Running 2:08 has left me knowing I can go faster — I’m hungry to get back out there and start training again, and get ready for the Trials."

Ryan will take some time to recuperate, then set his sights on outdoor track, with the goal of getting his qualifier for next year’s Olympic Trials. Sara will do the same, hoping to qualify in both the 1,500 and 5,000. "Carrie Tollefson [who won the 2004 Trials 1,500 after failing to make the team as one of the favorites in the 5,000] is sort of a good example for me," she says.

But while the 100 and the mile may still be the glamour events in the eye of the American track fan, Ryan realizes the marathon is gaining fast, thanks to the two medals won by Kastor and Keflezighi in Athens. And, due to the unpredictable nature of the event, it is probably his best chance to get his own shiny bauble, too. "We’ve definitely identified the criteria for success from the mile to 10K," says Mahon. "But in the marathon it’s a little less sure about who’s going to win."

It’s also an event that forces an athlete to go through many ups and downs over the course of 26 miles, much the same way Ryan and Sara have done in their short careers. But whether in a tough race or a trying period of running, both can fall back on a faith reminiscent of many of their African counterparts in the lead pack of distance races around the world. "It helps you keep things in perspective," says Ryan. "That’s something I still struggle with. Having that central belief and feeling that running isn’t everything is such a blessing because then you can handle the highs and lows a lot better. In college running was the center of my life and it took a lot of heartache for my faith to be in the center, but life is so much better, whether running is going well or not, if faith is the center.

"Some people think that God’s just there like a lucky rabbit’s foot and if you think He’s on your side you’re going to win every race, but that hasn’t been my experience at all," he continues. "It’s not like He’s just going to make me Olympic champion or world record holder. Could He do that if He wanted? Sure, but is He going to make every Christian a phenomenal athlete? I think God wants us to work hard; He tells us to in the Bible. It’s a really big part of our lives and what gives us passion.

"Something that all runners grapple with, especially elites who are doing it full time is ‘Why am I doing this? What gives it meaning?’ because running in itself, it’s a fun thing to do but you don’t really produce anything tangible. Through our running we can touch other people, and affect their lives in a positive way, otherwise it’s totally empty in itself.

"It’s taken me a long time to realize, ‘This is running, this is what I’m supposed to be doing. This is what I’m made for.’"